Monthly Story (July '23): The Austens of Henry’s Ferry

Fiction

Andrew needed to talk. In person. Could she come over? He’d be at Cuppa Joe’s using the Net all Friday afternoon, working. Sarah did hear him emphasize working. She prayed it wasn’t money again, but kept mum. Told him she’d be there after the gym.

“The gym? Mom? You’re working out at the gym now?”

Cheeky.

Sarah drummed her fingers on the kitchen counter. “I need to get going,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Is everything all right?” She waited through the long pause at the other end of the line.

“Sure,” he finally answered. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Well, okay then. See you tomorrow. Hope you don’t mind sweaty.”

She busied herself straightening here and there as she made her way through the house, though nothing actually needed straightening. The floors were already swept and vacuumed, the surfaces dusted and polished. In the years since the children had grown up and moved out, everything magically returned to its proper place after it had been used, and no cobwebs survived long enough to gather in a ceiling or floorboard corner—or behind a dresser even.

A beautiful summer day, sunshine poured through the windows, so Sarah collected her gardening tools from the neat little shed outside the kitchen door. The shed Andrew had built. She began her tour in the flower beds out front. A careless dandelion leaf recklessly showed itself among the geraniums. Delighted, Sarah dug to its tap root and lifted it out, then examined her prisoner at arm's length before tossing it onto the compost heap. She patrolled the beds front, side, and back, including the large vegetable garden terraced onto the side of the hill behind the house. Andrew, always handy, had built a high wire fence to, as he put it, “keep the critters out.” That boy could always do anything with his hands. Why he insisted on this web design freelancing, which never worked out for him, she could never understand. “Slinging code,” he called it self-importantly. Well. But people would always need things built.

She found no accomplices to the incautious dandelion, so put her tools away and took a glass of iced tea and a book to the patio. For the first time it occurred to her that if Andrew wanted so badly to talk, he could have driven over from Boyelston and gotten a free meal in the bargain. She’d recognized the urgency in his voice, so why didn’t he come over? He had so much to do over there? “Nothing I can’t handle” indeed!

But then, sitting in the sun on the chaise, she tried to lose herself in David Copperfield. The classics, she maintained, were best read by adults. Why anyone in his right mind would assign such a book to a high-schooler, as had been done in her children’s school, struck Sarah as absurd. Only Jane, her eldest, had any use for good literature now. The other two couldn’t be bothered. She sipped her tea, irritated, unable to get into this favorite story.

Eventually, she put the book aside and washed out and polished her glass before starting on her new routine. The village hung onto a shoulder where Tucker’s Mountain dropped to the Delaware Canal and river. No more than a string of houses, really—those on one side of the road with the canal in their back yards, those on the other with the mountain. At one end, a road snaked through a gap in the hill; at the other a simple general store/post office, a colonial-era inn, and a footbridge over the Delaware River. She headed for the footbridge, watching for tourist drivers. Stopping high above the canal and peering over the edge of the bridge, she thought maybe she should change her mind and walk the towpath instead today, but decided against it. She turned and walked briskly to the New Jersey end of the bridge and then even more briskly back again, performed a smart about face and repeated the exercise three times more. Someone had told her it was an eighth of a mile across. She had no intention of driving all the way over to Boyelston to get onto a treadmill with all those perfect young bodies bronzed in the tanning booth. Not on such a beautiful day.

Still breathing hard from her exercise, she climbed the three steps up to the store. “Whoa!” Ruth Malloy nearly shouted. Sarah had been trapped in the same class with Ruth from kindergarten through twelfth grade. “Aren’t you the rosy-cheeked one today!”

Ruth was still famous for punching and elbowing other girls on the basketball court or in field hockey, and Sarah stiffened at the sound of her voice. As pasty and round as the crusts of pies she baked for the tourist trade, Ruth sat knitting in a rocking chair behind the glass case of cigars, pipes, tobacco pouches, bongs, and rolling papers, framed by the cash register on one side and a revolving post card display on the other. For sale in this “general store” were illustrated maps of the area, books of local history and haunted houses, a huge photographic book of Early American stone work detail on the local barns and meeting houses. Interspersed on the shelves of snacks and candy, canned beans, and boxed mixes were jars of fancy jellies and jams, pickled asparagus and beets, cute potholders and recipe books. Near the back, in the “post office” corner, were two cases, one for dairy, the other for produce.

“I should do like you,” Ruth boomed as Sarah began inspecting the romaine. Everything else in the produce had already headed south. “You won’t find anything good enough back there today.” Ruth spoke as if she hoped someone outside might hear.

“I mainly wanted eggs, anyhow,” Sarah said as she picked out the best of the romaine. “And my mail.”

Ruth heaved herself out of her chair, simultaneously depositing her knitting and finding her balance on the glass case. “You have a package,” she called across the room, then limped toward the post office. “I’ll get it for you.”

Sarah peered through the glass on her letter box. Empty. “How big is the package?” she asked. “Maybe I should come back with the car.”

“You’re in shape,” Ruth answered without turning from her search through the stack of packages in the back. “All this new exercising must be for something.” She winked. "Trying to look good for that Sheldon Lang, I suppose," she practically bellowed. "I see how you look at him."

Everybody knew people made assumptions, but Sarah wished she could lie, "Oh, we're just neighbors." As things stood, though, it would be the pathetic truth.

Huffing and making alarming whistling noises in her nose, Ruth brought the package out from behind her station. Sarah knew she should leave it and go get the car. It was large enough that she’d need both hands getting it home. She returned the romaine to the case and decided to forget the eggs.

“All yours, my lady,” Ruth announced, pushing the package across the counter.

The address said “Andrew Austen, C/O Mrs. S. Austen.” If he had only come over for this all-important conference of his, he could have saved her from having to wrestle this thing home. Ruth plopped back into her rocker and took up her knitting, moving her lips counting stiches. Sarah remembered her reading that way in school.

“Well,” Sarah held her head bravely, “thanks bunches.”

“Don’t want the eggs then?” Ruth didn’t look up.

Sarah managed to get the door opened a crack and pushed it further with her toe. “Oh, I completely forgot. Maybe I’ll drop by later.” Ruth did something funny with one side of her mouth. “Thanks again,” Sarah told her and escaped.

She managed to get the package home without too much discomfort. Instead of taking it inside, though, she slipped it onto the Beamer’s back seat.

Any hope that she would have less to think and worry about after the children were grown was, of course, foolish. But maybe that was over dramatic. Jane and Olivia caused no undue concern. Two out of three was not so bad. Nevertheless, she had lots to do in the morning and needed a good night’s sleep. Jane’s two little ones, Scott and Emma, were coming for the weekend later in the day, so she’d have to invent some memorable entertainment for them before going to the gym, meeting, Lord forbid, with Andrew, then doing a major grocery shopping before the children arrived.

She kept the windows and curtains open that night and lay in bed enjoying the moonrise. Across Canal Road, a light burned in Sheldon's third floor, his study. The silhouettes of the houses across the road made her think of those black paper profiles, silhouettes, her grandmother hung in matted frames in her upstairs hallway. There was one of herself, done when she was ten. She couldn’t remember what had become of that. Maybe she’d stored it away in one of the steamer trunks in the attic. It might be fun to dig that out for the kids. The children. She’d started saying kids, like everyone else, as if they were goats, tried to catch herself. And maybe Olivia could be enticed to come over and spend Saturday night.

Andrew. Sarah studied the moon. A while ago it sat squarely in the middle of a pane of glass at the center-top of the window. Now it straddled two panes lower, descending. The light at Sheldon's blinked out around one. No mother with true feeling wouldn’t worry over an Andrew. Others of her generation—the “youth of the Sixties”—gave their children too much freedom, too many choices, too little direction. She hadn't been like that. Not everyone had let their hair down, thrown tradition to the four winds, for goodness sake. We do our best, but our children become their own people, no matter what. Our job is to intelligently help them. Wasn't that it?

In the kitchen in the morning, still in bathrobe and slippers, she took a pen and notepad to the table with her coffee. Her new diet would go out the window at least for the weekend. She made a list, which incidentally included much of what she‘d gotten rid of to begin her new regime: pasta and bread, pancake mix and syrup, cookie batter and chocolate chips. She’d pick it all up after a good, guilt-clearing workout at the gym. The list complete, she remembered and emailed Olivia from the desktop's new home by the window. “Can you come over Saturday and stay the night? We will have the children to ourselves.”

And she had an idea.

She changed into jeans and a new sweatshirt, both straight out of the dryer—and climbed the narrow staircase to the attic. She pulled the string that lit all three light bulbs and then began prowling the mounds of suitcases and trunks hidden behind racks of prom gowns and sports coats, winter pants and a whole rack of her late husband’s business suits. Had they ever thrown an item of clothing out? It hardly seemed so. She considered what she’d have to do to clean this space for Scott and Emma to play in. She immediately retrieved the vacuum cleaner from the second floor hall closet and lugged it up the stairs. Then she ran the 25-foot extension cord from the plug in the hall to the attic and began attacking the dust and cobwebs in the corners and along the rafters. Vacuuming and dusting took well over an hour. She didn’t want to straighten much. There had to be a messy quality for what she planned, but she thought no self-respecting grandmother would allow the children to play in all that dust.

After she returned the cleaning equipment to its place downstairs, Sarah began methodically going through the trunks of pictures, more old clothes, school assignments, elementary school art work, board games, puzzles, Christmas ornaments, baseball gloves, fur hats, softballs, tennis balls, golf balls—in short, everything imaginable and surprising in the history of a family. She even found her own wedding album, and opening it up found the silhouette profile, still in its matting, tucked in there along with some other papers. She knew she’d kept it, but what had she done with the frame? It didn’t matter. Her second grade report card was right there with it, too. “Good grief!” she said aloud, opening it up to read the teacher’s comment at the bottom of the page: “Sarah knows numerous facts,” it said, “but could certainly be more flexible and tolerant where areas of interpretation and opinion are concerned.”

“Well,” Sarah huffed, “that’s your opinion!”

She began making a list of some of the interesting things she’d come across:  Jane’s first grade self-portrait, a cherry wood bowl Andrew made in seventh grade wood shop, a bundle of letters Sarah’s mother wrote to Olivia during her year abroad in Peru, the trumpet Jane played in high school marching band, many, many baby pictures. The idea of creating a family tree of baby photos and artifacts momentarily lit her up. But, no, a scavenger hunt, her original idea, was better. Olivia could lead the grandchildren. That would keep them going most of Saturday afternoon.

Later on, she drove her body hard on the treadmill and even tried some of the exercise machines. Muscle tone, she told herself, that’s what she needed. And burn off some flab. It wasn't as if she'd gone completely to seed. She forced herself to look in the mirror along the wall. Well, this would be, would have to be, a very long term commitment.

“You definitely look like you’ve been working out!” Andrew grinned up at her when she came into the coffee shop. “Wow, what a change.” He giggled at his joke.

“Don’t let me forget,” she answered. “I have something of yours in the car.” She dropped her gym bag onto the chair across from him. “Do you want anything else? I’m getting coffee.”

He waved the idea away. “I’m good,” he said.

“You don’t need a refresher?”

“I’m okay.” He touched the screen of his laptop in a couple places and closed the lid. “Go ahead and get your mocha and a muffin.”

Sarah got herself a plain black coffee. “So,” she began, careful not to slosh her drink as she approached the table. “What’s all this about? I wondered why you didn’t just come over. Are you sure everything is okay?”

He motioned matter-of-factly to the laptop. “You know. A lot to do.”

She adjusted her posture and waited for elaboration. When he offered none, she said, “Things are going well then,” and, taking a first sip, watched over the rim of her mug.

His shoulders slumped. “Yes and no.” His head lay on one side as his face searched for what to say next. “I’m finishing a job for that guy I told you about. A web site with video and an online store. Pretty elaborate. The pet shop guy? You remember.”

Actually, she remembered only vaguely. Hadn’t there been something not quite right about this client from before? But she kept that to herself. “Good,” she said. “That sounds substantial.” Her tone said, "For a change."

Andrew straightened defensively, turning the volume knob up a notch. “He’s really a cool guy. We’re putting up videos of kittens and puppies. Very cute stuff to keep people coming back for more. And then the more exotic stuff he sells, too. Parrots. Iguanas. Snakes. Like that. This is going to be great advertisement for me!”

“You have always been so talented using your hands, building things,” she began.

“I know, I know,” he cut in. “And, really, when you think about it, that’s what I’m doing now, too. You build a web site. You do. People don’t realize that. They think it’s just some buttons you push!”

“I remember how good at woodshop you were in school. Mr. Hanes always said. . .”

“Oh, that again! Woodshop! This is nothing like that!” He laughed, fully animated. “That’s so—what do people your age say?—‘yesterdaysville!’ Web design is the new woodshop!”

Sarah, not for the first time, considered how she’d have to become more adept at the computer. Andrew and his sister Olivia never had a time when they weren’t on it every day. Often during their high school years she’d heard them upstairs happily arguing, exploring this or that on the desktop. Maybe she could get Sheldon to show her. He always spoke knowingly about such things.

“This guy, his name is George, he’s been all over the world. He used to bring in exotic species. Hide them in his shirt, down his pants, you know, and bring them in for dealers. But now that’s more and more risky. You know, um, because of the feds and how so many people got tired of taking care of them and let them go. So he decided on this pet store thing instead and it’s worked out because he’s a really smart business guy. I’ve learned a lot from him. You should go and meet him, see the store. It’s practically right around the corner almost. He’s only a few years younger than you, I think.” He grinned at her. "Maybe you might get something going, you two. Forget that old coot across the road."

“You say he was a smuggler?”

“Well, not anymore. We all have some kind of criminal background!” The mocking grin again.

“I don’t! And I certainly hope you don’t!”

He laughed the deep, pure mirth she remembered from his early childhood. “Well, yeah, lots of people then. No, not you, Mom.”

Sarah knew better than to press her son about his “criminal background,” which she felt pretty sure extended no further than smoking pot. His naiveté amused and infuriated her. He was too immature to realize how rude he had been. No worry on the criminality score at least, though. Andrew wasn’t likely to become an international smuggler. Lord help us all if he did. An imaginative boy, he simply liked the idea of knowing one. What did worry her was money. Not hers. His.

“And this fellow is a trustworthy business partner?” she asked.

“We aren’t partners. I’m doing a job for him. There’s nothing to worry about, Mom.”

“I meant in the sense of paying on time, making reasonable demands, that sort of thing.” She doubted any of this to be steady or safe. “I hope you are getting more out of this work than a possible advertisement.” She knew what that meant.

“Oh, he’s paying me, if that’s what you mean. As soon as I’m finished.” His eyes found the framed paintings on the wall across the room, then a couple of pretty teenaged girls coming in the front door. “In the meantime, though. . .” and his voice trailed off.

“In the meantime, you thought you’d talk to your mother?” This new wind blew off some of the mist and Sarah took in the lay of the land. “So he’s not the trustworthy partner you hoped.”

“Oh, he is! Yeah.” Andrew became all animation again, full of confidence. “That’s not it. You have it wrong. You have it wrong.”

She waited. They were on familiar ground: She didn’t understand computer work. She didn’t understand his “business” dealings. She misunderstood the motivations of his friends. But then he surprised her.

“I got 50% up front, but that was a month ago. And then,” dramatic pause, “last week the transmission went out on the Geo.”

“Ouch.”

“Right.” He leaned back and jiggled his knees. “I hate to ask. . .”

He was getting too good at this. Sarah did a quick visual map with Andrew’s apartment dead center. Easy walking distance to this coffee shop with its free wi-fi, an easy walk to the grocery store, and to a perfectly nice town park with flower gardens, a pond with ducks and geese to feed, a tennis court, and on summer days, she imagined, plenty of pretty girls. “Where did you say this pet shop is again?” she asked in the middle of her calculations. He indicated around the corner. So another easy walk. And he needed a car because why? If he had paid her the outstanding balance of the most recent “loan” and if he had paid what he did cough up with any sort of regularity or grace . . .

“Andrew, my dear, you still owe me more than three hundred from the last time. We can’t keep doing this.”

“Mom, everybody needs a car these days.”

And she was a computer-illiterate fuddy-duddy if she thought otherwise. “It’s not as if you are living out in Henry, Andrew. There it would be different, but here in town everything is handy. Put your head down, make a budget, set some goals, and work harder. My goal is to have you pay off what you still owe me by your thirtieth birthday. That gives you a year and three months, which I think is more than enough time.”

“Mom, are you joking? Be reasonable. How am I going to be able to run a business without a car?” His voice cracked just a tiny, reluctant bit. “You could help me if you wanted to.”

Sarah didn’t bother telling him there’s help and then there’s help. She didn’t want the details of how bad his situation was, worried he might not even have the rent money. Her mind automatically groped for solutions and strategies, as it always had, but this time she actively fought the impulse. “You yourself told me you didn’t need a car, that that was yesterdaysville. You said everything is done online these days. Email. Social media. You said that.”

“So what am I supposed to do now?” he demanded.

“Don’t be petulant, dear. It’s unmanly.” She smiled, taken aback by herself. Spoiled he was, her youngest and the only boy. She clicked her tongue. “Chickens coming home to roost, Andrew.”

“What? Are you making fun of me, Mom?”

She hadn’t realized she’d said that out loud. “No, no. I’m sorry. I guess I meant both of us." Then, as an afterthought, “I think I’ve been at fault, making things too easy for you.”

“Right. Thanks.”

Sarah wiped her lips and stood to bus her mug and napkin. “Are you staying?”

“I have work to do!”

“Let me do this and then I’ll run out to the car. A package came for you.” She crossed the room and dropped the paper napkin in the trash and the mug in a plastic tub with other dirty mugs and dishes, then, passing Andrew on her way to the car, gently, affectionately, touched his shoulder. Before lifting the package out of the back seat she bent over and read the return address on the label. Except for the word “Thailand,” it was unpronounceable.

What to think? It couldn’t be a live animal inside. What else? It hadn’t been heavy to carry home, only awkward, and nothing had shifted around inside. Herbal medicines? Marijuana? These seemed to Sarah the most likely contents. She considered not giving it to him after all, saying she’d made one of her stupid, fuddy-duddy mistakes, but kicked the car door closed and carried the package into the coffee shop. 

She watched Andrew’s face close into a mask as he looked at that label.

“Are you going to tell me what’s in this package?” she said.

He couldn’t look at her. “Maybe not,” he said.

“Tell me what’s going on, Andrew.”

Silence.

Then, “I don’t know what to do.”

“Is it his?” she said.

He began nodding his head, thinking, tapping a fingers on the table, nodding. “It’s not mine.”

“Take it to him,” she said. “Tell him you don’t want any more packages, but you’ll finish his work.” She watched as he took this in. It occurred to her that the package should have come to his apartment address anyway. He had helped set this up. “You need to get paid,” she said, thinking a double meaning.

His face still closed, he nodded one last nod as acknowledgement. “Okay,” he said.

“You need to sell the car, too, if you can’t afford to fix it,” she heard herself say. She had only then thought to bring him home to live, but dismissed the idea. “You have internet right here. Free. You have a phone.” She took her time looking around the room. “You won’t be the only person working here. Sheldon does all his architectural work remotely.” She wasn’t sure why she said that. “If you want to be an entrepreneur, you’ll need to knuckle down.” She didn’t say, and you’ll need to grow up.  

He stared down at his hands.

“Oh, don’t look so defeated,” she said. “Jane is dropping the children off for the weekend. You’re going to have a great time with Scott and Emma, sweetheart. They adore you. And Olivia’s staying over. You two can stay up late talking.” She didn’t add, about how unfair I am. She showed him the list for the scavenger hunt. “Forget your worries this weekend and you’ll start pulling it all together on Monday. Call Olivia and ask her to pick you up if you want to come. Your choice.”

The next morning after breakfast, the sun already high and the day heading toward hot, Sarah took David Copperfield with a cup of iced tea to the patio. Scott had wandered into the woods behind the house, exploring. At one point she saw he seemed to be making a fort out of fallen branches.

Olivia stuck her head out the door.

“Where’s Emma?” said Sarah.

Olivia pointed skyward. “Up in my room. Reading with Andrew.”

“Ah,” Sarah smiled.

“Do you want to start the scavenger hunt now?” Olivia asked.

Sarah imagined for an instant all the pictures and artifacts of her family, the family she had made, all those achievements and difficulties and memories piled up and talked about and examined and never finally understood, and then she tilted her head for a moment: A child making a fort in the woods, another stretched out reading a book with a fond uncle, and she, the mother of the generations, with an opened book on her lap and her iced tea.

“No,” she said, taking a long breath, “but later. The four of you can do it after lunch.”